With popularization of the Internet, the streaming service develops rapidly. The streaming service may be based on a Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, HTTP). Plenty of basic facilities including web server and content distribution network (CDN) support HTTP transport. The HTTP-based streaming media are becoming a trend.
The streaming service comes in two different types: record play and live play. Record play means that the played media content is created beforehand and then played, and is not real-time. Film play is a typical example of record play. Live play is relative to record play, and refers to playing media contents in real time. A typical example of live play is rebroadcast of a sports match, in which the sender creates the content in real time, including content coding and editing, and the receiver receives the content synchronously that is created by the sender in real time.
In a traditional streaming service, after creating a connection with the server, the client uses specially defined time “now” (now) to instruct the server to play the content, and then the client can receive the live content. In this process, the client does not need to learn the storage location of the content, and the server as a control entity sends the current content to the client. In an HTTP-based streaming service, the server is a passive service provider, and the server can only send a file or a part of a file to the client as requested by the client, and the client needs to indicate the requested file (using a URL), or a part of a file (using a URL plus a location interval), expressly.
In the process of implementing the present invention, the inventor finds the prior art has at least the following problems:
In the HTTP-based streaming service in the prior art, the live media data is generated in real time, and the client is unable to learn the accurate location of the currently generated media data beforehand. In this way, the client is unable to request the lately created media data, which brings difficulty to the live play service.